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Executive order to allow hospitals to restart elective procedures

CHARLESTON — Hospitals in West Virginia could start offering elective procedures by the end of April under a new executive order signed by Gov. Jim Justice Monday.

Hospitals wishing to restart elective surgical procedures can request approval from the Department of Health and Human Resources starting Monday to offer elective procedures. It’s the first step in a long process to slowly begin re-opening the state’s economy since being shut down March 23.

“We’ll take baby steps in starting back, and those steps will be done on the advice of our experts,” Justice said. “We have got to start the engines back. We have got to start back, and I can assure you we’ll start back as safely as we possibly can, but there is no chance we can avoid 100 percent of the risk. There’s risk on both sides.”

Justice’s executive order will allow hospitals to use the next seven days to make sure they’re ready and prepared to reopen next week. The hospital would then need to submit to DHHR and meet specific criteria – such as having enough personal protective equipment and other supplies – before getting the green light from the state to restart.

“We have to restart our hospitals,” Justice said. “We have to restart from the elective surgeries and form the general care that maybe you’ve been laying to the side that you need to do. Because if you don’t do some of those things, we could very well lose you too.”

Dr. Clay Marsh, the state coronavirus czar, said the state is enthusiastic about being able to re-open hospitals for other medical services. Marsh said it was a sign that the state hospital system can now handle potential surges of severe coronavirus cases with being over-extended and that health professionals were not at risk of running out of personal protective equipment. It was also a sign that state residents were taking social distancing requirements seriously.

“Our hospital CEOs and association, our state medical association, physicians, nurses, other folks have done an incredibly responsible job in preparing and being ready for the potential for a surge,” Marsh said. “Because of the great work of each citizen, we have not seen that and, in fact, we are among the best states in the country.”

Marsh also said re-opening hospitals is being made possible by increasing opportunities for coronavirus testing. The state has acquired 30,000 swabs and 15,000 test kits. As of now, the state itself can test up to 2,500 people per day, or 17,000 per week. The state is also collaborating with LabCorp, which can process 65,000 tests per day with a turnaround time on results between one and two days.

“That’s going to be a very important addition to safely opening up hospitals for surgeries so that we can support the testing of people coming in and support the testing of people who work in high-risk areas,” Marsh said.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, expanding testing is important to being able to re-open more sectors of the economy in order to see where severe cases of the virus remain and be able to quarantine those people.

“I think we have moved past limited testing where we have to have everything done symptom-generated – and we realize now many of the people passing COVID have limited symptoms – screening these people for asymptomatic infection turns out to be really important,” Marsh said. “Today we don’t feel like we have effective limits on what we need to test.”

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